Love Noel and Gertrude, Bea Lily for their wit and fun. Your post captures their spirits and in the nick of time as the daily dose of toxicity continues to poisoning the airwaves with orange Dumpster’s latest version of reality.
Love the quote from Nabokov. I've started at last talking with my parents. Maybe they weren't such ogres after all. Oh, well, they were. But they were interesting than I ever knew before.
You forgot my favourite line ”In Bengal to move at all is seldom if ever done.” Isn’t it interesting how the people who are best able to nail and pastiche the English upper crust often don’t come from it? Evelyn Waugh was a similar example.
London Pride is a song that invariably makes me tear up. I can’t even think of it without recalling that iconic picture of the dome of St Paul’s in the Blitz. I went and looked around the house where Samuel Johnson lived a few years back, it’s just off Fleet Street and there’s a lovely statud of Hodge his beloved cat. I was told by one of the guides that it escaped bomb damage because the lady living there in the Second World War handed over the upper floor (where the Dictionary was compiled) to the ARP wardens and the London Fire Brigade as a place to meet up and let off steam a bit, and so they always made a point of looking out for it. It’s a nice story, even if it isn’t true. London is full of surprises like that.
i'll attest that wet heat is much worse than dry heat; the humidity here in nola makes me feel like a do-rag schmatta every day (is there any word more delightful than schmatta? it made me so happy to see it pop up here!) looking forward to the zoom tomorrow! xx
Love the sense of place and time. In the UK I did elocution lessons all through the 70s -- my teacher was also plump and lost. And I still have Northern vowels :)
I'm so envious that you are watching season 4 of Resident Alien. It will be a while before it filters through to France:)
I've been in Palm Springs when it's 120 -- no big deal. I've been in upstate New York when it was 74 and humid, and I thought I was going to die. So I really feel for everyone back there in the East right now.
"Nabokov said time was a curtain, where events unrelated in reality touch each other in the folds of memory." I feel this is true, have tried to express it myself, so thank you for quoting Nabokov. I wonder, how did he know this, from his life of privilege and upheaval? Where realities disappear and yet are replaced by other realities, sheer curtains shifting in a breeze. Do you know the source, so I can find it too? Thank you, Laurie, for your always interesting reflections.
Mrs. Warren's feather reminded me of Shaw's Pygmalion: “In Hampshire, Hereford and Hertford, hurricanes hardly happen.”
Exactly! That’s why I called her Mrs. Warren.
In the folds of memory I am painting in an Oklahoma City shack while listening to Ella Fitzgerald sing Cole Porter. Thank you for that spark.
Love that!
Love Noel and Gertrude, Bea Lily for their wit and fun. Your post captures their spirits and in the nick of time as the daily dose of toxicity continues to poisoning the airwaves with orange Dumpster’s latest version of reality.
Surprise is another word for god. That’s what my pal Kerol Rose would say. I like a mutual surprise in audience and performer.
Love the quote from Nabokov. I've started at last talking with my parents. Maybe they weren't such ogres after all. Oh, well, they were. But they were interesting than I ever knew before.
You forgot my favourite line ”In Bengal to move at all is seldom if ever done.” Isn’t it interesting how the people who are best able to nail and pastiche the English upper crust often don’t come from it? Evelyn Waugh was a similar example.
London Pride is a song that invariably makes me tear up. I can’t even think of it without recalling that iconic picture of the dome of St Paul’s in the Blitz. I went and looked around the house where Samuel Johnson lived a few years back, it’s just off Fleet Street and there’s a lovely statud of Hodge his beloved cat. I was told by one of the guides that it escaped bomb damage because the lady living there in the Second World War handed over the upper floor (where the Dictionary was compiled) to the ARP wardens and the London Fire Brigade as a place to meet up and let off steam a bit, and so they always made a point of looking out for it. It’s a nice story, even if it isn’t true. London is full of surprises like that.
i'll attest that wet heat is much worse than dry heat; the humidity here in nola makes me feel like a do-rag schmatta every day (is there any word more delightful than schmatta? it made me so happy to see it pop up here!) looking forward to the zoom tomorrow! xx
Love the sense of place and time. In the UK I did elocution lessons all through the 70s -- my teacher was also plump and lost. And I still have Northern vowels :)
I'm so envious that you are watching season 4 of Resident Alien. It will be a while before it filters through to France:)
Really looking forward to the zoom tomorrow xx
See you there!
Thank you for this, and for the full text of the song, which I had never heard or read in full.
It's not the full text, but you get the gist.
I've been in Palm Springs when it's 120 -- no big deal. I've been in upstate New York when it was 74 and humid, and I thought I was going to die. So I really feel for everyone back there in the East right now.
Loved the Noel Coward bit. I was born a decade too late…
"Nabokov said time was a curtain, where events unrelated in reality touch each other in the folds of memory." I feel this is true, have tried to express it myself, so thank you for quoting Nabokov. I wonder, how did he know this, from his life of privilege and upheaval? Where realities disappear and yet are replaced by other realities, sheer curtains shifting in a breeze. Do you know the source, so I can find it too? Thank you, Laurie, for your always interesting reflections.
Speak Memory.
Thank you. So this is a good time to read that again.